


Aurora Tenebris

by Fandomme



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: "You call this archaeology?!", Angst, Ben POV, Ben Solo Angst, Ben Solo Deserved Better, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Ben Solo and the Last Crusade, Ben Solo is a Mess, Ben addresses the whole sister issue, Crystal skulls but they're Holocrons, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dathomir (Star Wars), Dream Logic, Dream Sequences, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Logic, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad (Star Wars), Gen, Grail Diary but it's about Holocrons, HEA, HEA Guaranteed, Indiana Jones References, Kef Bir, Kylo POV, L3 finally gets some credit for her navigation skills, Look that holocron was on Vos' ship begging to become a story, Medical, Medical Device, Medical Trauma, Mortis (Star Wars), Nightsisters (Star Wars), Pining, Repressed!Ben, Second Death Star, Sith Holocron, Sleeping Beauty Elements, Slipstream - Freeform, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Trailer, Teasers & Trailers, That's Not How The Force Works, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Unrequited Crush, World Between Worlds, Yearning, girlfriend in a coma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-01-30 22:51:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21436009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fandomme/pseuds/Fandomme
Summary: He has been poisoned. Abducted. Quite possibly, he has been betrayed into the hands of the Resistance, so that the First Order won’t have to clean up the mess of a coup. It would be so easy for Hux to just sell him out, give him up. Claim the Resistance took him, make him a martyr, rally the troops.But all that is academic at this point. On the monitor in front of him, Rey is asleep. She is asleep in a medpod, under a bubble of information. She is very pale. And no matter how hard he throws his mind at the barrier between them, it bounces off.“You’re our only hope,” the traitor FN-2187 says.“We need you,” says the pilot, Dameron. “To wake her up.”“With the Force,” the traitor adds.“That’s not how the Force works,” he says, when they take out the gag.
Relationships: Asajj Ventress/Quinlan Vos, Finn/Rose Tico, Kylo Ren & Rey, Kylo Ren/Rey, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Poe Dameron/Rey, Qi'ra/Han Solo, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 111
Kudos: 274





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kylo is kidnapped, and Rey is dreaming.

The last time he sees her is after his mother dies.

There’s a terrible silence when it happens. Like the sound of a life support mechanism suddenly cutting out and stopping: a low, ambient hum at once present through its absence. He feels it in his guts. In his navel. In the place where they were once connected.

And just like that, like a draft moving through a house, one door closes and another one opens: the corridor linking him to Rey is once again clear. She’s standing at one end of the conference room. She’s covered in blood and dirt. But what he remembers, for weeks afterward, is the way the tears cut tracks through the grime on her face. She mouths the words “I’m sorry,” and then he hears Hux’ footsteps behind him. When he turns back she’s gone.

And she stays gone. For months. Mostly.

There are the odd flashes, of course. He’s used to those by now. Sometimes she’s standing in his ‘fresher mirror, behind him. Sometimes he smells her, just walks right through a cloud of her (machine oil and fresh linen and sweet, milky tea), and he has to stop and look around and make sure she’s not actually standing right there, under his nose. Sometimes at night his ears pop, like he’s changing altitude, and he feels pressure shifting on his bed. He squeezes his eyes shut because he knows if he opens them she’ll be gone.

This happens mostly when he’s asleep, or very tired, or very bored. When his defenses are down. His anger can crowd her out — distractions help. He has to keep his mind working. And he is very busy: they have an entire fleet to rebuild. It’s slowing their advance on the Mid-Rim and Core worlds. They’re bleeding money. Their creditors are raising interest rates. And he’s new and the remaining leadership doesn’t like him, and so now there are calls for “a sober second look” and “a critical re-evaluation of the current strategy.”

Then, of course, there’s the recording: someone smuggled a clip of his duel with Skywalker out of the First Order file system and onto the holonet, and now the clip is everywhere. The guns, the shoulder-brush, the old man’s evaporation into the wind. And now, of course, because there’s no body and no evidence of his death, people are saying that Luke Skywalker is still alive. That he could be anywhere. That he’s clearly helping the Resistance.

Which he probably is. On some level. Maybe he’s continuing Rey’s tutelage from beyond. Maybe they’re having a laugh at how they bested him. Maybe they’re laughing at him, right now, this minute, laughing about how stupid, gullible Ben wasted his time fighting a ghost.

He has so many ghosts to fight, these days.

There are the ghosts of his mother, and his father, and his uncle, and his grandfather, and Snoke, and Palpatine, and all the dead Jedi and dead Sith and dead padawans — the ones he killed, the ones his grandfather killed. He is soaked in death. It hangs on him like a wet cloak, heavy with blood, dragging behind him as he strides down the halls. Sometimes he thinks there should be a trail of red in his wake. His people certainly act like they see it: they look at him like he’s the end of everything, not the beginning of anything.

So he’s in a bad place when the dream happens.

In the dream he’s on the second Death Star. Of course that’s impossible, and he has never been there, but he recognizes it. From stories and holos and his own fantasies.

(“Why didn’t you just kill the Emperor?” he had asked Luke, all those years ago. “You were right there.”

Luke had stared at him for a long moment. He felt the stare go deeper, into his mind, and walled up his defences accordingly. “I wasn’t there to kill the Emperor,” Luke said, finally. “I was there to save my father.”)

In the dream he’s hunting for something, trying so hard to find it, and it’s right around the corner, no, this corner, no, that one, or another one, just a little further, a little deeper, a little darker, a little colder, and he is moving down and down and down past the bones and the ruins to the hungry heart where something is very much alive-

-and he wakes with a start, bathed in sweat, hands shaking, throat raw.

“Where are you?” he whispers.

But she doesn’t answer.

And she doesn’t appear.

For weeks.

He would know, he reasons, if she were dead. He would feel it. As he felt Luke, and his mother. She’s not his blood, but she might as well be. He used to wonder about siblings: Han was gone so often, and so long, and his wife was so busy. It wouldn’t be a stretch. His own mother had a long-lost brother. It would be just like the Force to throw him a little half-sister, impetuous and headstrong, seemingly born with a key to his mind. It would explain some things. Like how she bested him. Or the rising panic he felt whenever she cried.

He prays, fervently, that she is not his sister, and that she is not dead.

So he feels profound relief when he sees her alive again. Relief, and an all-encompassing urge to beat the men standing before him into a fine paste. Because he is bound and gagged, and he is in a very small room, and his sweat smells like drugs. His head is pounding. The last thing he remembers is ordering dinner into his quarters.

He has been poisoned. Abducted. Quite possibly, he has been betrayed into the hands of the Resistance, so that the First Order won’t have to clean up the mess of a coup. It would be so easy for Hux to just sell him out, give him up. Claim the Resistance took him, make him a martyr, rally the troops.

But all that is academic at this point. Rey is asleep the monitor in front of him. She is asleep in a medpod, under a bubble of information. She is very pale. And no matter how hard he throws his mind at the barrier between them, it bounces off.

“You’re our only hope,” the traitor FN-2187 says.

“We need you,” says the pilot, Dameron. “To wake her up.”

“With the Force,” the traitor adds.

“That’s not how the Force works,” he says, when they take out the gag.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kylo takes the gloves off.

They don’t mention where the base is. He can pry it out of their minds later, along with the location of an escape vessel. But doing so will take energy he doesn’t yet have, and focus his throbbing head can’t yet muster. This base might be the bottom of a pit. Or it might be a ship. Either way, it feels far removed from organic life, and so does Rey.

“How long?” he asks, but he already knows the answer.

“Since Kef Bir,” Dameron says. “Two standard months.”

“You let her go. Alone.”

“I don’t _let_ Rey do anything. Rey is her own person. She said she had to find something in the wreckage of the second Death Star, so she went.”

Some of his clarity returns. The anger helps it along. Stupidity, he decides, should be painful. It should hurt, in a real and physical way, when stupid words come out of a stupid mouth. “Did she say why?” he asks.

“She said something about a relic,” Dameron says. “One that could turn the tide, if we got to it before you did.”

“She found a description of it in one of the old books, I think,” FN-2187 says. “She was taking notes, in a diary, and she was using maps that Han had on the Falcon-”

The look he shoots the traitor is enough to silence him. “Let me guess,” he says. “The maps were just as disappointing as the man himself.”

Dameron holds up a finger. “Han Solo was a great man, and you are-”

“I am _this_ close to walking out of here." _A__nd taking her with me_, he adds silently. “I know the Resistance is more accustomed to field medicine, but this is not a hospital.”

“You destroyed our hospital frigate,” Dameron reminds him.

He smiles. “So I did.”

The traitor slams a hand down on the table. “You unbelievable bastard!”

“My parents were married,” he says. “Let me see her.”

“Absolutely not.” Dameron folds his arms. “Just, you know, do the thing.”

“The thing.”

“The thing. With the Force. Wake her up. She said you put her to sleep, once. Just do the opposite.”

An explosion of rage rests on the tip of his tongue. But he is also strung out, and very tired, and over Dameron’s shoulder he can see her sleeping, her body neater under the blankets than it usually is. In the room, uncertainty pours off the others in waves. They are re-considering this whole plan. They recognize the insanity of it, the sheer audacity. They think he hates her. They think he’ll refuse. They think the only reason he has to agree is to guarantee his freedom. They have no idea how much he wants to break out of the cuffs and take her out of this pitiful excuse for a clinic himself.

“You’ve tried every other option, haven’t you?” he asks.

“There weren’t a lot of options. Not a lot of Jedi just hanging around, happy to help. Wonder how that happened.”

“What’s done is done,” he says, and feels a ripple of surprise from both of them. “I can’t heal her from here. I need to be in the room with her.”

This is a lie. In truth he has no idea what’s wrong, or how to heal her, or where to even begin. What he needs are those texts, and the diary, and probably the entire Library of Ossus, and also a Dreadnought-class First Order medical bay with a full staff. What he has instead is the almost painful urge to adjust her blanket. It’s not nearly high enough. She must be cold. Somewhere in there, she must be cold.

“Fine,” he says, when they remain silent. “Let her die.”

They go outside the room to talk. He’s alone with the monitor. He focuses on her image, reaches out. What he feels between them is smooth and cold and unyielding. It’s not like her usual barriers. Those often seem like built objects. He always had the sense that he could puzzle those out, find the right mechanism, unlock the door. This is like a hardened lava flow. It feels…old. Implacable. Permanent.

“Okay,” Dameron says, and his awareness snaps back into the room. They’ve returned. They don’t look happy. “You’re up.”

* * *

He could Force open his restraints, if he really wanted to. Instead he tries to get his bearings for when he — they, the two of them, together — do escape. The rebels cover his head and wheel him down a hall — left, then right, then a set of doors, another left — and they key something into the door — five digits — and then he’s there and she’s there and he thinks his knees might actually give out.

It’s been so long. Too long.

They unlock his feet and he stumbles a little getting the feeling back into them. He shuffles over to the pod. Makes a show of checking her vitals. All the icons, the blood and breath and brain, are in the happy white zone. She seems healthy. Everything normal. She’s paler than she should be, but hyperspace does that. And she’s lost muscle mass over the past two months. They can remedy that, after she wakes up. If she wakes up.

So he flips the lid on the pod. Behind him, the pilot and the traitor make noises, and he holds his bound hands up. The lid opens slowly, and, hidden away from the others, he closes his eyes to breathe her in. Her smell is different, stale: no tang of sweat or bite of oil. She’s supposed to smell like hard work, like snow and sea and sun. Elemental. Now she smells like antiseptic.

He reaches for her, then thinks better of it. He bites the middle finger of one glove and pulls his right hand free, then his left. When he awkwardly takes her hand in his bound ones, two things happen: the men behind him hiss, audibly, and her heart actually skips a beat. “Hello, Rey,” he says.

He strokes a thumb over the top of her hand. He was right to touch her skin-to-skin; she was cold, after all, and he can feel his warmth bleeding into her chill. “Rey, you need to wake up,” he says. “I’m alone in this room with your friends, and if you don’t wake up, I’m going to kill them.”

“What the-”

“Look,” he says, and nods at the screen. Her heart is beating faster. “Rey,” he says, re-addressing her, “you know I’ll do it. You know they can’t stop me. I’m very strong and I’m very angry, and if you don’t come out here and fight me, I’m going to do something…monstrous.”

In his hands, he feels one of her fingers twitch.

“That’s it,” he croons. “You know you want to wake up. You have to. You have to come out here and fight me, like you did in the forest. Do you remember the forest, Rey?”

Her heartbeat is still rising.

“I nearly killed your friend. And if you leave him alone this time, I’ll finish the job. So you have to face me, now, like you did then. You have to make your stand.”

On the machine, her heart begins to change colour. Blue is burning into orange. “I don’t think this is helping,” the traitor says. He feels them move behind him.

He lowers his voice. “You’ve been so brave. They have no idea. I know you’re afraid. But if you don’t wake up and fight me, I’ll win. And you don’t want me to win, do you?” 

Beside him, her sac of bacta explodes. Her heartrate is dangerously high. Lights sizzle and flicker overhead. “What’s going on?” the pilot barks.

“There you are,” he says. “That’s good, Rey. Come on. Come out here and finish it.”

He says these things aloud, but his hands coil around hers and suddenly he’s someplace far away and very quiet, standing in front of a thick wall of black glass. It extends infinitely to his left and his right, and it stretches forever into the sky. The sand at his feet is as white as the sky above, and it is made, he somehow knows, of bone. And behind that wall, her shape so familiar he’d know it anywhere, is Rey.

He lifts up a hand. In this place, he’s not wearing gloves. His skin looks painfully alive and vulnerable. He reaches out. On the other side of the glass, she reaches out, too. “I’m here,” he whispers. “I’m waiting.”

His fingers touch the glass. A sandstorm roars to life. 

* * *

“Hey. Hey. Hey. You. Supreme Leader. You alive in there?”

He blinks. They’re standing over him. A light fixture hangs awkwardly from the ceiling, dead but sparking. His mouth tastes like blood.

“Blink once for yes and twice for no,” Dameron says.

“This is nothing,” he mutters, and sits up. Stars explode in his vision. He reels. Blood gushes out of his nose.

“Easy, easy,” Dameron says, crouching. The pilot reaches out but doesn’t touch him. “Finn, can I get some water?”

And suddenly there’s water, in a canteen, and Dameron is actually unscrewing it and trying to make him drink it, which is difficult with bound hands. The water mingles with the blood in his mouth and he actually spits it out before swigging again. What with one thing and another, he’s consumed a great deal of his own blood over the years. He refuses to do so any longer. When he finishes drinking, he realizes he’s breathing harder than he should be. He’s dripping sweat.

“What happened in there?” Dameron asked. “You were whispering something and then your eyes rolled up and you were on the floor.”

His eyes track over to Rey’s vitals. They’re back to normal. She’s fine. They’re both fine. Nothing to see. Just a man who had a seizure and a woman who’s trapped behind an extremely dark piece of Sith magic.

“I need that diary,” he says. “And those books. And the map.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should I get a Tumblr? I feel like I'm so bad at managing my time already, it would be dangerous. But there's no way for you to find me, otherwise. Anyway, let me know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kylo reveals a secret.

“How do I know you’re not just looking for the same thing she was looking for?” Dameron asks him, a day later, in the same anonymous room where they started. They let him sleep. They let him eat. They have yet to give him the books. They are losing time. It takes real effort to keep his knee from jigging under the table, where his hands are again bound. For focus, he keeps his eye over Dameron’s shoulder, on the monitor where Rey sleeps.

“She said it was a weapon,” Dameron continues. “She said it would turn the tide. And she wanted to find it before you could.”

“The First Order has no need of ancient weapons,” he says. “We can build whatever we imagine.”

But he does wonder. What was hidden in the glittering skeleton of the second Death Star? What did she discover? What in the galaxy could possibly be so important, that she would take such a stupid risk? And why,_ why_ hadn’t she told him?

“Are you building anything right now?”

His eyes re-focus on the pilot. “What am I here to do? Inform on the First Order, or save Rey?”

“Anything you tell me in good faith goes a long way toward my feeling better about you seeing those books,” Dameron says.

“You abducted me,” he snaps. “You drugged me and tied me up and brought me here, and…” He should be dead. Or on trial. He should be facing justice, or whatever passes for it in this hive of hypocrites. But he isn’t. They’ve left him alone. In his mind, something falls into place. There is only one way this makes any sense. “No one else knows I’m here.”

The tightening of Dameron’s jaw tells him all he needs to know, but he pushes anyway. He leans forward. The table is too small for him. He hunches over it and feels Dameron trying to maintain his composure.

“The rest of your precious Resistance, they have no clue, do they? They have no idea what you’ve done. That the author of their annihilation is sitting right here, with you. They’ll never forgive you, you know. Once they find out. It’s over. You’re done. Finished.” He cocks his head. “Why would you risk that? What could possibly be so important that…”

And just like that, he knows. The Force guides his intuition like it always has. It’s so obvious. He laughs. It starts with one quick snort and then he can’t stop. It’s so stupid. This whole thing. The Force has a wicked sense of humour. It’s cruel and absurd and also very funny. He laughs and laughs. He can’t remember the last time he laughed like this. It must have been years ago. Before everything.

“What’s so funny?” Dameron says, after two full minutes.

“You. I’m laughing at you. You’re in love with her.” He pulls his smile even wider. He’s suprised his face remembers how. “Does the traitor know? Or is that why you haven’t said anything?”

Dameron pushes away from the table. He stands up. “Your mind tricks don’t work on me. You-”

“I don’t need mind tricks to know what you’re thinking. You’re in love with her. Say it.”

Dameron isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at the ceiling and shaking his head softly, clearly at the end of his rope. His hands are at his hips. He continues shaking his head. “I’m not doing this. I can’t do this with you.”

“It’s useless to hide your feelings from me,” he reminds the pilot.

“I love a lot of people,” Dameron says, which might be the truest thing he’s ever said. He can hear the truth in it. It rings out, crystalline and sharp, like a tuning fork. Finally the pilot turns to meet his eyes. “See, that’s what’s different about us. About our people. We love each other. You guys, the First Order, you just…eat each other alive.”

“At least we’re honest about it.”

“Oh, really?” Dameron asks, and rounds on him. “Because from where I’m standing, it takes one to know one, pal.” He jerks a thumb at the monitor. “You think I didn’t see how you were looking at her? You think I didn’t notice that?”

“Rey and I have a connection that you will never understand,” he murmurs.

“Oh yeah? Is that why she almost had a heart attack when you tried to help her?” Dameron’s eyes narrow. “_Were_ you helping? Because it didn’t look like helping. It looked like you were hurting her.”

This is too much. Just like that, it all comes crashing in. The drugging, the abduction, the cloak and dagger nonsense, Rey’s illness, all of it. He Forces the pilot down onto his knees and yanks him up over the table, so their faces are inches apart. He squeezes. Blood vessels in the other man’s eyes begin to pop. It’s not easy with his hands bound, but he finds himself accessing heretofore-undiscovered reserves of focus and clarity. That’s the thing about his rage — it’s always there, right when he needs it.

“Have you forgotten that I can break you like a twig?” he hears himself saying. “Really. Anytime I want. The only reason I haven’t is because you’re keeping her alive. Do you understand that? Once for yes and twice for no.”

Dameron blinks.

He releases his grip. Dameron slips down, gasping, choking for air. The pilot sits across the table from him, breathing hard and staring at him with real anger. “Connection?” he manages to say.

He smirks. “Didn’t she tell you?”

It’s righteous vindication, watching doubt flutter over the pilot’s features. It’s almost as sweet as realizing that she’s never told them, the thieves she calls friends, about what’s between them. That she’s kept it private. Granted, it likely benefitted her never to mention it — she was so desperate to find a family that she would never call her own loyalty into question. But her reticence has granted him the opportunity to puncture that famous rebel spirit. Her secrecy has left a fatal flaw in her compatriots’ armour. Rey doubted herself, and in so doing, doubted the people around her. And where there is doubt, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is the Dark. De-stabilizing anything, whether it’s a family or a planetary government, begins with that truth.

He might have killed Snoke, but only after learning a thing or two.

“Do you know why she wears those gauntlets?” he asks. It’s the most hurtful thing he can think to mention. She’d kill him for telling. For telling it this way. He’s not even aware if she knows that he knows. Sometimes he just remembers things, like she told him a story only she didn’t, the stories are just there in his head. But this one’s true and it’s verifiable and if she wants to shut him up she should just wake up and do the job herself. “It’s to hide the scar. The one on her left arm. On the inside.”

What he doesn’t say is that she was hanging deep inside a wreck and lost her light and reached out to grab it, scraping the tender skin of her inner arm on an extrusion of wire that was mostly invisible in the dimness. She felt a sharp tug of pain, and then the light came back to her. He suspects she used the Force to grab it, without being properly aware of it. What he knows is how long she hung there, watching the life ebb out of herself, wondering if anyone would miss her if she died there, one skeleton suspended inside a much greater one. But something in her, the same spark of hope that kept her alive in the desert and the _Supremacy_ and everywhere else, blazed into life. She cauterized the wound with her own soldering stick.

“See for yourself,” he says. And he watches, on the monitor, as the pilot does. He sees him seeing it, the long white line that looks like despair. She had been so good at carving little marks, marking out her time and her loneliness. To his knowledge, she has never carved one in her own flesh. But Poe Dameron doesn’t know that. Poe Dameron only knows that he has revealed something extremely private, something that only someone Rey truly trusts might know.

Or perhaps Dameron simply thinks he’s seen her undressed. (As though the banality of clothing actually matters to him, when he's been inside her mind and she in his. It was so silly, the way she averted her eyes from his naked skin. As though that nakedness was somehow more shameful than her earlier exposure of his deepest fears.) Either way, revealing her secret is good for him.

Dameron looks years older when he re-enters the room. It’s something about the set of his shoulders, the pace of his gait. For the first time, he notices flecks of silver in the other man’s hair. The war is aging all of them before their time. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that every man who has ever been a father to him is now dead. He is alone. It’s his turn, for better or worse. And he had been trying to make good use of his turn, playing the hand he’d been dealt, and then this. This woman. This room.

“You can have the books,” Dameron says. “You can have whatever you need. Just..” Dameron’s lips roll inside his mouth. His eyes are bright. “Just, please…”

“I will,” he says.

* * *

He builds an office in her room. “I need unobstructed observation,” he says.

“Yeah, you probably want to sleep there, too, right?” the traitor says, rolling his eyes.

“If the First Order attacks this location, you’ll wish I were with her,” he murmurs, and continues adjusting the map so that it projects uninterrupted in the centre of the room. It’s definitely one of Han Solo’s: the file format is archaic, and barely supported by the projector. Han Solo’s notations are all over it: dive bars and places he got raided and even spots he stashed cargo. The routes crisscross each other, disappearing through hyperspace and re-emerging in seemingly random places, like watching a thought jump around someone else’s head. The Falcon’s navigation system was unique, to say the least: it often felt more like a person than a ship. But Han Solo said that was part of her charm. She didn’t take him anywhere he didn’t need to be.

(“Like the Force?” he’d asked, once.

The old smuggler had sunk back in his seat, blinking. After a moment, he said: “Hell, kid, I guess so.” )

The others are still talking, when he puts the memory back in its place. “And some plants,” he says, interrupting. “I want plants.”

“Plants,” the traitor says.

He nods at the woman asleep on the gurney. “She likes plants.”

He might explain that the best place to heal her is probably out of doors. He might elaborate, and say that her mind is buried in a kind of tomb; he needs to surround her body with life, tempt her back to this side of that terrible black wall. Flowers and sunlight and soft rain and fresh breezes — that’s what she needs. But moving locations increases the risk of being discovered. If the Resistance has found a secure enough location — and he knows it’s secure, otherwise his own spies would have informed him of it before now — it won’t do Rey any good for them to abandon it.

On the third day, a short woman with dark hair, a crescent moon pendant, and desperate, aching grief hands him a single potted moongazer lily. She’s armed with a hand-made stun device that under other circumstances, he’d really like to take apart.

“I hope they never let you out of here,” she spits.

He looks over his shoulder at Rey, asleep in the pod. “Same,” he says. She flounces out of the room and doesn’t see his smirk. He places the lily beside the pod, and continues reading.

The map is one thing. But the books are something else. When the traitor brings them in it’s like he’s ushered an entire opera company into the small room, and each member of it is whispering his every name. Pain prickles up along all his scars. It hurts being in the same room as them. He has no idea how Rey could possibly have resisted immersing herself in them. In fact, he suspects that she didn’t avoid that particular temptation at all — and it landed her on Kef Bir, in the ruins of a failed superweapon. One of the texts must have whispered a little louder to her than all the others. But which one? Which would have drawn her? Where to even start?

“You could have told me,” he says, aloud this time. He expects no reply, but it feels better looking at her and saying the words. He’s holding an open book and staring at her. His frustration feels especially futile when her eyes aren’t open to see it naked on his face. “I would have come. You had to have known that. We could have…”

But that’s a lie. There would have been no adventure among the tombs, no discovery of any ancient weapon. He would have stopped her before it began. He would have found a way to keep her off the surface of that hellhole, kept her awake and alive and furious. He’d have locked her up. He’d have gladly watched her hatred of him grow, over the days and years, if it meant she was in a place where he could see and hear it happen. He’s thought it over numerous times: him imprisoning her, her imprisoning him. That’s the only way the story can possibly end with both of them alive. 

Sometimes he dreams of the causeway on Starkiller, the whistling void beneath his feet, and he says he is being torn apart, and when the saber glows red it illuminates her face instead. And sometimes he’s on his knees before her, and Snoke tells her to claim everything that’s hers, to become what she was born to be, and the flash of light slices through him cool and sweet as water in the desert. He’s not sure which are more disturbing: these dreams, or the other ones. The ones that end on a decidedly different note.

“I’m going to be very angry if you’re really my sister,” he says, and goes back to the book.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments, those of you who have commented! It makes me very happy.


	4. Chapter 4

When he opens his eyes she is standing across from him. She’s wet and shivering, and the hand she stretches out to touch the thick, shadowy glass between them shakes a little. “Let me see,” she whispers, and it echoes: _let me see, let me see, let me see_.

“I’m right here.” His voice sounds so small. His throat is closing. He reaches out his own hand to meet hers. “Rey. I’m right here.”

“Let me see…”

“Look at me.” The glass is shockingly cold. It burns; he feels his fingertips sticking to it. He can see his own breath. “Look. I’m right here.”

A single tear slips down her face. “Let me _see_,” she pleads.

He throws a little Force into his voice. “See me,” he instructs. “Look. You will look and you will see me.”

She blinks. Shakes her head. “I can’t. I can’t…”

“You will see me. You will see me standing before you.” He watches her trying to refocus her gaze. “You will see me standing before you. Just me. Nothing else.”

“Ben-”

“I’m here, Rey. I’m right here.”

Her face crumples. “It’s a trick, no one’s coming, I’m alone-”

_“You are not alone!”_ The heat in his voice surprises even him. But she snaps to attention, as though years of programming have suddenly taken over. For just a moment her reflection wavers in the glass and she is much smaller, much younger; she is a child bracing for a slap. His chest aches. “You are not alone,” he repeats, gently this time. “I’m. Right. Here.”

Taller again, she presses both palms against the glass. He reaches and mirrors her, stretching his fingers over hers. He wills warmth through the glass. “I’m so tired, Ben.”

“You will leave this place.”

“I thought I could do it…”

“You will leave this place and come to me.”

“I thought I could do it alone, but he won’t let me…”

“Who?”

“He’s calling me-”

“WHO?” He pounds the glass. “Rey! Who?”

She leans her head against the glass. She’s beyond exhausted; she’s withered, as though something is sucking the life out of her drop by drop. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I failed-”

-And then he’s awake, and for just a second he can see that everything in the room is hovering in mid-air before it comes crashing down around him. The small, dark-haired woman with the crescent moon pendant retracts her hand from his shoulder like she’s been burned. “Are you okay?”

“What?”

“You were crying,” she says. “In your sleep. And things were, um, floating?”

She gestures at the rest of the room. The moongazer lily has fallen out of its shattered pot. Books and paper are everywhere. He has not done this since he was a child. It enraged his mother like nothing else: the pots of ink spilling everywhere, the priceless art in whatever state apartment they inhabited that year now ruined. She hated the chaos of the Force. She preferred the rule of law. Preferred organization and regulation and deliberation and talking things out and nudging them, gently, in her own direction. But never with the Force. Never. That she always got her own way was purely by dint of her own negotiating skills. It had nothing to do with Jedi mind tricks. Why, suggesting anything else would simply be rude.

The girl is holding out a greasy chamois. “For your face.”

He ignores it and wipes his face with the heels of his hands. He clears his throat. She snorts and stuffs the chamois back in her pocket. In unison, they both turn to look at Rey. She’s sleeping peacefully as ever. In fact, she looks a little better off than before: her cheeks have a hint more color. Or maybe he’s just deluding himself, making himself see things he wishes were there. Either way, the display flickering across the glass indicates no change.

“So, I’m Rose,” the girl says. “And this is awkward.”

“You have no idea.” His throat hurts. His voice is thick with tears. How mortifying.

“What am I supposed to call you?” When he glances at her, she shifts a half-step away. “I mean I am definitely not calling you Supreme Leader, so you can just get that thought right out of your head. But are you Kylo Ren? Are you Ben? Are you-”

“I’m tired,” he says.

Her jaw drops. “Look, mister, there is no need to be rude. You’re lucky you’re not in restraints. You could at least pretend to be grateful.”

She sounds so much like his mother that he has a reflexive urge to hide his face in shame. Instead he just stares. It’s only natural that his mother’s influence would have trickled out across the Resistance. That they would adopt some of her attitudes and mannerisms. He had simply not prepared himself to encounter it. That was his mistake.

“You’re right,” he says, because those two words had the power to mollify his mother, too. “I apologize.”

“Well. Fine. Apology accepted.” She crosses her arms. “You should eat your dinner, you know.”

He looks at the little wafer of greyweave and canteen of water. “I’m not hungry.”

“You have to keep your strength up. We didn’t bring you all this way just so you could mope.”

“I’m not moping,” he says, and even he hears the petulance in his voice. “I’m researching,” he adds quickly. “I’m trying to retrace her steps. See what brought her to Kef Bir. Understand what she was looking for. If I can learn that, then I can learn what did this.” He regards her again. Would Rey have confided in another woman? Possibly. She’d kept Dameron in the dark about their connection; maybe she’d hidden other things from him, as well. Maybe Dameron was incapable of giving him the whole picture. “Did she say anything to you before she left?”

Rose scowls. “She never mentioned _you_, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

He shakes his head. “No. Just…is there anything she might have told you, that she wouldn’t tell the others? Something about her plans?” He tilts his head. “She wouldn’t have wanted to worry the boys,” he says, softly. He threads the Force into his voice like a glittering hook at the end of a silken line. “But you’re strong, like her. You’re tough. You know how to do hard things. She could trust you.”

“She could trust me,” Rose murmurs.

“What did she tell you?” he whispers.

“She told me she was scared.” Rose's eyes glaze over. “She told me she didn’t know if she could do it alone.”

“Do what?”

“Solve the puzzles,” Rose says. “She said there were…riddles. She found them in Han’s diary. She would have to solve them in order to find what she was looking for.”

“And what was she looking for?”

“She said the puzzles were meant for two,” Rose continued. “Only two people could solve them. Because..."

“Because the Sith travel always in pairs.” His eyes flick over to Rey, asleep in her pod. For the first time since his abduction, he allows himself to feel genuine fear. “Rey, what have you done?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...this is the point at which I stopped. Should I continue? Is this worth finishing? Would you like to see the end? Please let me know in the comments.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kylo reads his father's diary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY! I'm sorry this took so long. I had a lot of plot to figure out and a lot of TROS feelings to eat and a lot of research to do. But things are finally starting to come together! Thank you for your patience! And please leave feedback; I thrive on it.

His father’s diary is a leatherbound volume so stuffed with notes and pictures that it requires an old bootlace to tie it shut. At some point — probably multiple points — it got waterlogged, and now the edges of each page are rippled. They crackle as he turns them. The dates jump forward and back through time; there’s no index or other guide. His father likely never meant for anyone else to read or even see the thing. He himself has only the vaguest memories of the diary. Once it fell out of the compartment under the false bottom of the starboard bulkhead, and the pages fell open to the drawing of a woman with dark hair, dark eyes, and soft features. At the time, he thought it was a terrible rendering of his mother. Now, he realizes it was someone different entirely.

Qi’ra. Her name is Qi’ra. His father’s handwriting is there in block letters under a series of the same face: now in profile, now smiling, now holding a sword, now frightened and being dragged away by shadowy figures with big helmets and bigger shoulders. There are some other details: Correllia, a year, a list of other names organized by crime syndicate. His father has drawn overlapping circles with the names inside: Crimson Dawn, Black Sun, Pyke. The usual suspects. Some of the names inside each circle are crossed out. Were these people she knew? People his father knew?

It’s odd, seeing his father’s handwriting again. His father wrote in a crabbed, blocky script, all capitals, like a child. During his time with the Empire, his father did a series of grunt jobs in between missions like all squaddies: sanitation, short-order cookery, all working his way up to carpentry. It was during this work that he actually learned how to read and write. Certainly the crime syndicates of Corellia had no desire to help him better his circumstances, and decades later he still read slowly and wrote uncomfortably. Then he had a son who was a born calligrapher. A son who teased him mercilessly about his terrible script.

“You’re just a memory,” he says, to himself, and a moment later the tightness in his chest passes.

Then he turns the page, and he sees it. The hairs on his arms prick upward and something inside him goes very, very cold. Cold like the halls of _Supremacy_. Cold like Snoke’s voice in his mind.

It’s shaped like a pyramid. It’s elegant and brutal at the same time: it looks like a temple in miniature, which of course is what it’s meant to emulate. Not that Han Solo would recognize a Sith temple, any more than he recognized what this thing is when he first saw it. He probably just thought it was interesting, and therefore valuable, and decided he wanted to steal it. His father has scrawled rough measurements beside it. There is a date, and the words DRYDEN VOS and FIRST LIGHT.

Below that are the words: DOES QI’RA STILL HAVE IT?

And off to the side, in letters as delicate and spiky as a spinebarrel, is a question: _Why was Han looking for a Sith holocron? Was it for Ben?_

His finger runs over the place in his father’s diary where Rey has written his name, and for a long time he can’t bear to turn the page.

* * *

“Okay, you’ve been here for days now, and she still hasn’t woken up. What’s the deal?”

He’s back in cuffs. He knows how to Force them open, but has elected not to. He needs to maintain whatever goodwill he’s managed to establish with Dameron and the others. (Finn? Rose? He’s terrible with names.) Dameron sounds impatient. This plan isn’t working out the way he wanted to. There is a very real possibility that the First Order is looking for him, and things are getting hot. (There is an equally real possibility that Hux betrayed him to the Resistance; he tries to avoid considering that too deeply.) But Dameron’s primary weak point is the fact that the Resistance doesn’t know he’s here — if they did, they’d overthrow Dameron in a heartbeat.

He locks eyes with Dameron and opens his mind. “Dryden Vos,” he says.

And there it is: a tiny contraction of the pupils, a slight change in the pilot’s breath. Fear. Something old. Something secret. Something he has never told the others. “Never met the man,” Dameron says. “He was gone before my time.”

“Who was he?” the trooper — Finn — asks.

“He’s a story smugglers tell to kids to get them to behave,” Dameron says. “Right, Ben?”

He smiles thinly. “I wouldn’t know. I was exceptionally well-behaved.”

Dameron rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Vos was the face of the Crimson Dawn for a while. Big in the spice trade. That’s how I heard of him, back when. I used to, uh, know some folks in the spice racket. Vos was a real piece of work, or so I heard. Legendary temper. He had these scars, and people said they would change colour if he got angry. I mean, I never bought that part of the story, but it’s what people said.” He shrugs. “Anyway, he died like all these guys die. Betrayed by the person closest to him.” One of Dameron’s silvering eyebrows arches. “Sound familiar?”

Dameron thinks he’sbeing clever, needling him about his father, but instead the pilot has unwittingly created an opening in the rebels’ defences. He tilts his head. He makes his voice light, curious, almost friendly. “Oh, did she tell you what I did to Snoke?”

As one, their eyes flick to Rey asleep in her pod. He watches the question form on all three faces. She hadn’t told them. She’d said nothing. She’d kept that secret, too. Not that it matters any longer, not when he’s a prisoner, but pride rushes through him anyway. It would have been so easy for her to betray him — tell the Resistance what he did, undermine his rule, get him deposed — and she hadn’t. She’d kept him exactly where he was, and even better, she’d let them believe she was the one to murder Snoke. She’d worn that act like the gift it was, a gift he’d given her. Nothing he could ever buy for her — no gowns, no gems, no saber — could ever adorn her as beautifully as that story did. These people have no idea about his murderous girl, with her hands bloody and her teeth bared. They can't even imagine his perfect killer, who watched him blow a hole in someone’s face and didn’t blink. Dark Lords of passion and victory, how he misses her.

On the pod, Rey’s heartbeat picks up.

“I killed Snoke,” he says. “He was torturing her. And then I cut him in half. And then, together, Rey and I killed a lot of people.”

Of course, this is only one way of telling the story. He tells it the way that makes him sound the best. He skips some critical details. What he doesn’t say is _Snoke was torturing me_ or _Snoke was always torturing me_ or _He made me kill my father _or_ He wanted me to kill her and I couldn’t_ or _I think if she dies that I’ll die, too._

But the story he tells does the job. Doubt writes itself all over the rebels’ features. Only Rose looks vaguely vindicated. She nods to herself a little. Something has clicked into place for her. Something Rey said or did. “She never liked telling the story,” Rose says. She sounds impossibly sad. “The others would always ask her about it. They wanted all the gory details. And she would just say something about how Jedi didn’t take pride in death, or something.”

He laughs in their faces. They look at him with something like horror. He just keeps laughing. He can’t stop. Tears form at the corners of his eyes. The utter absurdity of it keeps hitting him over and over. As though Rey were ever really a Jedi. As though one single word could possibly contain her. Contain _them_. Contain this thing between them. She had finally emerged from that wreck she called a home and still she kept trying to cram herself into boxes that were far too small for her. He turns to the girl sleeping in the pod — maybe he really has been cooped up here for a bit too long —and says, “Really, Rey? _Really?_”

She doesn’t answer. He hears the slow hiss of her breath inside the pod, and the beep and pulse of her heart and brain, and this time the tears really do come. His vision blurs. If she doesn’t wake up, hewill be truly alone. Entirely. Profoundly. Her loneliness was the first thing he’d latched onto. It was the first thing that spoke to him. He’d thought he understood. He’d thought he knew what it meant to be alone. But he had no idea. Until now. His father is gone and his mother is gone and his master is gone and if Rey dies then there really will be no point, none at all. All of it, everything, will have been for nothing. His father. His mother. Luke and Crait and Tuanul and the Hosnian System and on and on and on. Meaningless. Senseless. Chaos. She’s the only thing that gives it any purpose.

“She was looking for something called a holocron,” he says, tonelessly. “The diary mentions one on a ship called the _First Light_, which belonged to a gangster by the name of Dryden Vos. It was there in 10 BBY. That’s when-” He catches himself about to say the wrong word. “That’s when Han Solo first saw it. It was one of many treasures aboard the yacht. There were other things: a golden idol, a crystal skull. He had no idea what it was, at first. But then he found out.”

“What are they?” Finn asks.

“They’re…” He licks his lips. They taste like blood. He’s been chewing them. Possibly in his sleep. “They’re an ancient form of data storage. The Jedi used them. And the Sith. The holocron in the diary is a Sith holocron.”

“That makes sense,” Dameron says. “Vos worked for a Sith. At least, that’s what people used to say. I thought it was part of the myth — you know, gangsters are always trying to make themselves sound like a bigger deal than they really are. But if it was true…”

“It was true,” he hears himself say. The drawing is too precise. It is as though the holocron had seared itself on his father’s memory. As though it wanted to be remembered. As though the Force had put it right in his father’s path and made sure he never forgot it.

“So, Dryden Vos was holding onto a Sith data storage device while he worked for a Sith,” Dameron says. “So what? Why would your dad write about that in his diary?”

He swallows in a dry throat. “Because he wanted to find it, himself,” he says. “Years later.”

“What would Han Solo want with a Sith holocron?” Finn asks. “Wait, was it valuable?”

“In the right hands, yes,” he says. “A device like this could only be opened by another Sith. Someone trained in the use of the Dark Side. If a Jedi opened it…” He looks again at Rey. “Depending on the security on the device, it could be very dangerous for the wrong person.”

Dameron points at him. Then he points at Rey. Then back at him. “So. Wait. Let me get this straight. You think that this is the weapon Rey was looking for? The thing that would turn the tide?”

“I think the holocron may have held data about that weapon, yes.”

This isn’t precisely true. But the lie serves his purpose. His suspicions are too terrible to speak out loud. If she did this because she thought Han wanted it for him, because she wanted to help him, he will have to burn this whole place down. If she’s lying there in that pod because of him, then they will have to kill him, because nothing else but death will stop him. And even that might not be enough.

“And you think she followed Han’s notes to get to it.”

“Yes.”

“And you think she opened it, or tried to open it, and this is what happened?” Dameron gestures at the pod.

“That is my operating theory, yes.” He tears his gaze away from the pod. “Was she carrying anything, when you found her on Kef Bir?”

For once, Dameron looks poleaxed. “I mean, I don’t know,” he says. “I wasn’t there. Chewie’s the one who went with her. He’s the one who found her.”

From somewhere far, far away, he hears something that distinctly reminds him of his father’s laughter.

* * *

<<When I met your father, it was like this,>> Chewie says. <<With him in chains.>>

He has heard this story. A lot. A long time ago, it used to be one of his favourites. When he was small, he didn’t understand why the story was supposed to be scary: he didn’t understand that some people couldn’t just break free of their cuffs, that some people couldn’t simply ask nicely for what they wanted, that not everyone could Force their way out of their own mistakes and had to rely on their wits and luck instead. As a child he had not understood that his father didn’t grow up believing in the Force, that every time he escaped disaster and death it happened not because he drew on some hidden power but because he was clever and fortunate and the other guy wasn’t. For every time his father made it, someone else didn’t.

<<He escaped Corellia,>> Chewie says. <<And Qi’ra didn’t. Back then. Before all this shit. He told me. Three fucking years, he tried to get back to her. It fucking ate him alive.>>

What a lot of people don’t know about Shryiiwook is that it’s mostly cursing. In that respect, Chewbacca's language is no different from R2-D2's. It really strengthened their bond, when they met.

<<I can’t be in the same fucking room as that little shit,>> Chewbacca had told Dameron. And so they were separated, with Chewie on a holo sprouting from his desk in Rey’s room. The holo renders him blue and grainy, but still he can see the changes: the mane is rougher, more strands of silver near the eyes. Chewie sounds like he’s been drinking. It makes him desperately wish for a drink of his own.

“Did he track her after that?” he asks, evenly, trying to get them back on track.

<<He tried to find the holocron.>>

The old Wookiee is trying to stretch this out. His eyes keep flicking up and down, as though trying to understand how the child he used to carry in his arms became this man, this thing, this monster. Even through the wall, he knows what the Wookiee is thinking: how weak human flesh is, how delicate the joints, how it’s impossible to use Jedi mind tricks when you don’t have a tongue or teeth or jaw. Once upon a time the Wookiee had been terrified to hold him, terrified of dropping him, terrified of his soft little skull and his floppy little neck. Now he’s wondering if he should have just let the kid fall. Just once. Just far enough. Just thrown him up in the air and not caught him.

“But he couldn’t find it?”

<<No. He never saw her again. He heard rumours. She was tight with some piece of shit Sith. Bad fucking news. Real shifty asshole, apparently.>>

“Is that why he was looking for the holocron? So he could find her again?”

In the other room, Chewbacca shifts uncomfortably. Which means it’s true. It means that during his marriage, Han Solo was looking for another woman. Sure, he covered it up by looking for the loot he knew she’d stashed on the ship she stole from her old boss. But there are treasures, and then there are the things you treasure. The things you can’t live without. The wounds that don’t heal. 

He looks at Rey asleep in her pod. "He loved her."

<<He knew he fucked up.>> In the other room, Chewbacca draws a deep breath. <<He knew he fucked up a lot of things.>>

Slowly, he nods. He cannot look directly at the holo. Not right now. He can only look at Rey. She’s so lovely, so still, so cold. So like she was when she arrived on _Supremacy_ in a chilly glass box. A gift he never should have let anyone else unwrap.

<<He was sorry,>> Chewbacca says. <<About everything.>>

“I know,” he says, and he sounds so young to his own ears that it’s almost shameful.

<<Are you? Sorry?>>

Now his gaze swings over to the holo. He can’t believe they’re debating this. That this is the price of Rey’s life. His contrition. His humiliation. His whole life has hinged on whether or not he was dutiful enough to the right person, and now the right person lying right there in front of him and she’s going to die if he doesn’t figure this out. “What do you think?”

<<Don’t you take that fucking tone with me, you whiny little pissant. Say it. Say it to me, right now.>>

He says it in Shryiiwook: <<Of course I fucking am, you sad sack of shit. But this isn’t about me. This is about that cunt Han was slobbering after when he should have been there for my mother.>> Chewie snarls in protest, but he just keeps going: <<This is about Rey. This is about helping Rey. Which do you want more: to punish me, or help her?>>

And that silences him. Chewie makes what to others sounds like a soft, mournful whine, but is really, <<Fine. Fuck you, too.>>

“Thanks. Now. Was she carrying anything when you found her?”

The Wookiee heaves a sigh. It shudders out of him. There is something he doesn’t want to say. Something he doesn’t want to reveal.

“Did she ask you to keep it a secret?” he presses.

<<You can’t Force it out of me.>>

<<She’s dying, you fucking moron. I won’t say it in front of this pussy-ass bantha fodder here, but it’s true. And you know it. You can fucking smell it. I know you can.>> He leans forward in his chair. <<You can punish me all you want. I can take it. You can rip me apart. But I swear on my grandfather’s ashes, Chewbacca, if Rey dies I will crush your throat. Now tell me the truth.>>

The others in the room have pushed away from him. His throat hurts. He realizes he’s standing up, roaring in Shryiiwook so loud his whole body shakes. He’d screamed like this the first time he lost her, too. On _Starkiller_. That empty chair and his too-full heart. It feels like years ago. The cuffs on his wrists burst open; they shatter into tiny pieces. He stares at his wrists. 

“Tell me,” he whispers. “Please.”

Chewbacca runs his paws over his face. He covers his eyes. Holds his massive face in his terrible claws. <<She recognized the drawing of the holocron in your father’s diary. It looked like something in one of the old books she stole from the island. Ach To. Where Luke was.>>

“Which book?”

<<A very bad book. Bound in the skin of a Dathomirian child.>>

His eyes narrow. If such a book was in the pile that Dameron shared with him, he would have noticed it immediately. At the very least, it would have been visually distinctive. But it almost certainly would have called to him in other ways. Darker ways.

“Did she ask you to hide it from me?”

<<She was afraid of it, Ben. It gave her nightmares. She could barely be in the same room as it. She said the words moved. That the book was never the same twice.>>

“What did the book say about the holocron?”

<<It said it was created almost a thousand years ago, by a Sith Lord. A man — a thing — called Andeddu, who discovered the secret of living forever. Something called _essence transfer._ Many people — many awful people — have gone looking for it. Somehow Dryden Vos acquired it. Which means Qi’ra acquired it, when she killed Vos. They were holding it for a Dathomirian named Maul. Maul once served the Emperor. The Emperor was probably looking for it, too.>>

The hairs on his neck have prickled up. Because he knows this story. He knows the name Maul. He knows of Maul’s fall, how he left the true wisdom of the Sith for the temporary pleasures of criminal life. Snoke told him that much. What Snoke didn’t tell him was that Maul was interested in one of the most treasured Sith artefacts in all history.

“Did the book give the holocron a name?” he asks, but he fears he already knows the answer.

Chewbacca finally lifts his head. Their eyes meet. <<It’s called the Holocron of Heresies.>>

"Oh, Rey," he murmurs. _Oh, sweetheart. If you wanted to kill me this badly, you should have just done it in the forest. It would have saved us some time. _


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is an empress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hits just keep on coming! I finally have an idea of where this plot is going, and once I had these scenes in mind I just had to write them. There are more TROS references in here, but I think they pop up pretty organically. Thank you for all your kudos and comments! Tell your friends!

When he rolls over, she’s there.

He feels her in his nose, first: the smell of her — engine oil and milk tea — and the tickle of her hair. But then there’s her warmth, both in the flesh and in the Force. It lances through him. He hasn’t felt this in months. And even then, it was momentary, phantom-like, something between a haunting and a fantasy. But this isn’t the ghost of warmth on the pillow beside him when he wakes up. This isn’t a silent change in pressure. This is her. Her smell and her hair and the rigidity with which she holds herself, as though even in sleep she is protecting herself from something. His breath catches.

“Don’t open your eyes,” she says, and her fingers thread through his. “Don’t wake up.”

He doesn’t have to be told twice. He focuses all his attention on the shape of her and moulds himself around it. A little shiver goes through her and she makes a sound like someone coming in from the cold. She’s still so cold, wherever she is. Wherever they are. She presses back into him and he wonders if she can feel his heart slamming in his chest.

“Don’t be afraid,” she murmurs. “I feel it, too.”

A sob chokes free of him. He is not alone. He has never been alone. He presses his lips to her hair. “I don’t know what to do.”

He is speaking about her illness, but also about everything else. He doesn’t know what to do. Not about her, not about the First Order, not about the Resistance, not even where to put his hands in this moment.

“Don’t do anything.” She sounds more peaceful than usual. “Be with me. Just be with me.”

He must be dreaming. This only happens in dreams. No matter how real it feels, no matter how the rise and fall of her chest seems to match that of his own, no matter how he can count the calluses in her palm or feel the skin of his inner arm catching on the scar across hers. She’s only ever this close to him when he’s dreaming.

“Is this what you were offering?” she asks. “When you offered me your hand?”

“Yes.” His voice cracks. He’s glad not to open his eyes, now, because if he does the tears will actually flow free. Because he’s about to say the most hurtful thing he can think of, the thing that has cut into him all this time, the truth: “And you wanted it, Rey; you wanted it, too, I _felt it_-”

“I did want to take your hand.” She squeezes his hand in hers. It sounds like she’s crying, too, a little. “Ben’s hand.”

He’s kissing her: her scalp, her temple, the shell of her ear, any little piece of her he can find in the dark. There’s salt on her skin. He needs her to turn around. Needs the little furrow between her brows and the determined set of her jaw. Needs her mouth. Sharp and sweet and perfect. “Rey. Please.”

“Why didn’t you say it?” She’s weeping in earnest, now. “Why did you leave me?”

“I didn’t leave you; _you_ left _me_. You left me lying there on the floor-”

“You _hurt_ me. You’re _always_ hurting me. You let Snoke hurt me.”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” He says it into the skin of her neck. “I’m so sorry.”

“You liked it, didn’t you?” Her voice is crisp. Sharp. A chill ripples over him. “Watching him hurt me. You enjoyed it.”

He squeezes her hand. She’s still so cold. “I hated it. I hated every minute of it.”

“You knew what he was going to do and you brought me to him anyway.”

“I thought…” What had he thought? It seems like so long ago, now. It feels like it happened to a different person. Like it was someone else who watched them slam cuffs on her and it was someone else who ushered her into the room where he’d been tortured, a polite hand at her back. But it wasn’t someone else. It wasn’t someone else who watched Snoke lift her in the air and turn her inside out. It wasn’t someone else who knelt there, reverent, humble, and silent, while his master ripped into her mind. That was all him.

“You thought he would give me to you,” she says for him. Her disgust is obvious. “To apprentice. If you were just good enough. Just once.”

“I…”

“And then when he didn’t give you what you wanted, you killed him. You used me to help you kill him. You were too weak to do it on your own, so you waited until I promised to help you, and I killed all those people for you, Ben, just like you wanted, and you still wanted more, you wanted to rule the galaxy, you never wanted me-”

“That’s not true-”

“If you really wanted me you would’ve just taken me and run.” Her voice is ice. So is her body. She’s so cold in his arms, but she’s not shivering. She feels like death. He has the terrible feeling that if he opens his eyes she’ll be dead. Dead, or worse. “But you didn’t. You brought me to him, and you let him hurt me, because you’re weak, just like your father-”

“You’re not Rey.” His hand spasms around hers. The certainty of it settles over him. This is not a dream, but it isn’t the truth, either. This is something else. Someone else. “Give Rey back to me.”

“What do you mean?” She giggles. It’s a silvery sound. It sounds like the snows on _Starkiller_. Light. Cold. Beautiful. Lethal. “This _is_ me, Kylo. This is what you wanted.” She twists in his arms. One single fingernail scratches its way up his spine. Cold breath curls around his neck. “Isn’t it?”

“You’re not her.”

“Sshh, don’t cry, it’s all right. I’m right here.”

He shakes his head. “No, you’re not. You’re not her.”

“I’m your empress,” she whispers, and a full-body shudder goes through him. “We can rule together, Kylo, like you said. We can end this, once and for all. All you have to do is take your place at my side, and-”

“Stop it-”

“You never wanted her, really. The scavenger. She knew that, deep down. She knew you were right, when you said she was nothing. She’s always known. She’s always known she was worthless, that she deserved to be abandoned, that you’d have to be drugged and kidnapped to actually help her, that you’d leave her like you left your mother-”

_“Rey!”_

His eyes open in the dark. His voice echoes. For a moment he’s genuinely confused about his surroundings. And then he hears the hiss of the pod breathing for her, and the slow pulse of her heart, and his entire being shatters into tears.

* * *

If the others were watching him on the monitor, they say nothing. But when he doesn’t eat the first meal of the day, the former stormtrooper Finn comes in and says: “Okay, Supreme Leader, it’s time you had a shower.”

Which makes sense. It really does. It’s about damn time. And he should be grateful. Or at least glad. They’re treating him humanely. They don’t have to. They even let him fall asleep in here last night, in Rey’s room, when his own cell is elsewhere. None of this explains why it’s so hard to stand up from the desk. Or why his gaze won’t leave the pod.

“Did you hear me? Or are you just ignoring me?”

His mouth opens. “I…”

Suddenly Finn hoves into his vision. The trooper snaps his fingers. “Hey. Supreme Leader. Snap out of it.”

He blinks. “I..” He shakes his head. “I slept badly…”

“Welcome to the club. Let’s go.”

Finn walks away. Slowly, he rises to stand. He presses his palms down on the desk to lever himself up. He feels so heavy. So old. As though he has aged overnight. Maybe he really should be eating the greyweave rations. But they taste like ashes and focusing on something else, anything else, seems impossible. Seems like betrayal.

“Solo?” Now Finn sounds more tentative. He should bristle at the name but he doesn’t. He feels Finn’s confidence blooming, and isn’t surprised when he says it again: “Solo. Come on. You’ve been in here for days. Don’t you want to go wash off?”

“I can’t.” His voice sounds choked. His gaze is riveted to the numbers on that medpod. The pulse of her heart against his own. His eyes are filling. He shakes his head. His voice is firmer, now. “I can’t move. I can’t leave. I can’t…”

Finn sighs. He strides wearily into Ben’s field of view and faces him. “You’re scared, huh?”

He nods. It’s too much to say out loud.

“You’re scared something might happen while you’re gone?”

Again, he can only nod. This is disgraceful. Snoke would flay him alive for this performance. But he feels flayed already: raw, open, vulnerable. It’s terrifying.

Finn is nodding to himself. “Yeah. Okay. I get that. But…” He turns and looks at Rey, then back at him. He points a thumb in her direction. “Do you think she’d just up and leave you like that? After all this?”

There are actual tears slipping down his face. Why can’t he move? Why can’t he stop this? It’s like watching himself lose a sparring match. It’s like being a child again. “She did leave me. I killed my master for her and she left me-”

“Hey.” Finn nods with his chin. “She left _all_ of us, man. She left us for whatever was on Kef Bir. She did this to _all_ of us. She left the Resistance defenceless.” He swallows. “You’re not the only one who gets to be angry.”

And there, he feels it, rippling through the Force: the resentment emanating from this man. The envy and jealousy. It’s hot enough to bring him to himself a little. Something in Finn’s darkness tugs at his own and pulls him back into place. It’s nothing out of the ordinary — a completely normal human emotion, and not even that strong — but it’s enough. He’s perversely grateful. Suddenly, he can move.

“You’re right,” he says. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The ‘fresher looks suspiciously familiar: “Is this an old Imperial base?”

“Does it matter?” Finn is facing away from him, but his voice still carries over the steam and water.

“I might know some of the codes,” he says. “And the layout.”

“Why, so you can escape?”

“So I can upgrade the firmware on the life support systems.” He grimaces at the paltry water pressure dripping from the shower head. “Maybe liberate some of the hidden food caches. Imperial Command always hid their own supplies from the grunts.”

“So nothing’s changed, is what you’re saying,” Finn says, and without looking he knows they’re both wearing the same smirk.

He washes quickly but thoroughly. The water does little for the pain in his neck and shoulders. His posture has gone to seed since entering captivity. Constantly craning his neck to look over or down at Rey doesn’t help. He’s rinsing the cream out of his hair when he notices it. A clump of hair comes away in his fist. More than he’s ever lost, before. He stares at the black-brown strands in his hand as though they came from someone else. But they’re his. When he runs his other hand through his hair, it too comes back with a hank of hair. He’s losing it.

“Solo?” Finn asks.

“I think I might be getting sick,” he says, as the floor rushes up to meet him.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which bedtime stories are told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I"m so sorry for the delay, everyone! Blame the pandemic. But I really do want to finish this, and I'm excited for the fun places it's going to go.

When he comes to, he’s on his cot in Rey’s room, and Chewie is sitting beside it. His arms are folded. He leans back in the chair that’s too small for him. <<They had me carry you>> he says. <<You’re way too fucking big.>>

There’s a glass of water on the floor by the cot. He takes his time picking it up and drinking. “I’ve lost weight since I got here,” he says. 

<<Well that’s because you’re way too fucking picky. You were always a picky eater. It’s probaby why you passed out. You need to eat what they give you.>>

Something pricks the back of his eyes. He can’t remember the last time someone told him to eat. He has a terrible feeling it was Snoke. “That’s not why I passed out.” 

<<Oh yeah? Then what the fuck happened?>>

He looks over at Rey. Then he looks at Chewie. It’s hard seeing him in person, and harder still seeing him with only a threadbare blanket to clutch for dignity. “I need that book you mentioned.”

<<What happened, Ben?>>

“I think the answer to Rey’s illness is probably in that book. I think her illness is the result of-”

<<I’m not letting you see shit until you fucking talk to me. Now tell me what the fuck is going on, or I walk. Right now.>>

Whatever else he may be, Chewie has always been as good as his word. That’s the nature of a life debt. If he plans to walk away, then he will. And for a moment, he considers letting the Wookie just walk out of his life again, this time for good. Maybe he can figure this out on his own. Maybe he doesn’t really need the book. Maybe it’s like a bedtime story, and all he has to do is kiss Rey and she’ll spring back to life and sit up in his arms and give him his name, and he’ll finally know exactly who he is and they’ll live happily ever after. 

Or maybe he could just learn to reverse time entirely, and go back to that moment on _Supremacy_, and slap those stupid words out of his stupid mouth. Both moments are equally impossible. 

<<Snoke said he used the Force to bridge our minds>> he says in Shyriiwook. But he doesn’t use the ordinary word for “bridge,” as in a rope bridge between trees. Instead he uses the formal word that means an alliance between tribes, usually in the form of an arranged marriage, which also happens to be the ancient term for “bridge.” He watches Chewbacca’s ponderous eyebrows lift. <<It means that even apart, part of us is always together. When she’s in danger, I know it. When she’s hurt, I feel it. Her pain is my pain. Her illness is my illness.>>

Chewbacca sits forward in his chair with a heavy sigh. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his paws. <<That’s not the Force>> he mutters. <<That’s love.>>

“There is no greater Force.” The words tumble out before he can stop them. Which is very strange, because it’s a thing Luke used to say. _That’s all it is, Ben. It’s love. It surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds us together when we’re apart. It’s part of all life, even in death. It’s there even though we can’t see it, even if we don’t want it. It can never be destroyed, only changed. That’s the Force. _

When he looks up Chewbacca is staring at him as though seeing him for the first time. He runs a paw over the crown of his head. <<Rey asked about you. About when you were little. I told her you were a punk-ass little brat, and she laughed and said _I know_. And I wondered how she could possibly know, but then she said she could imagine it.>> 

This is the first time he’s heard Chewbacca use a Shyriiwook word in place of Rey’s name. It must be his pet name for her. It’s the Shyriiwook word for a shaft of sunlight falling through the darkness of a deep forest. It’s also the name of an old bedtime story for children on Kashyyk, about a little girl whose parents abandon her deep in the woods where the shafts of light move between the trees to guide her out safely, to another village where there is a childless couple who prayed to the forest god for a baby and who adopt her as their own. And the image slams into him, heavy as one of the Wookie’s embraces, of Chewie telling Rey this same story while she lays in his old bed on the _Falcon_. It’s there in his mind clear as day: Chewie’s telling her that a long time ago, he told this very story to a little boy who always interrupted with more questions, about why the parents abandoned her, about what she must have done to deserve it, about the exact moment they stopped loving her. And Rey wipes her eyes and nods and smiles and burrows deeper under a blanket that was already too small for him when he was twelve. 

_They threw you away like garbage. But you can’t stop needing them. _

<<For fuck’s sake, kid, wipe your face.>> He wasn’t even aware he’d been crying. But he wipes his face with his hands. He blinks and Chewie is staring at him, hard. <<So Rey is draining you? Like a fuel cell?>>

“Sort of. I think so. I feel weaker. But I need to do more research to find out for sure how it works.” He tilts his head and switches to Shyriiwook. <<Do you have the book? And the holocron? If you tell me now, the others don’t have to know.>>

<<Fuck you. I can’t keep this a secret from them.>>

<<Didn’t Rey already ask you to keep it a secret?>> He cocks his head. <<She activated it. The holocron. She must have. It’s the only explanation. So where the fuck is it, old man?>>

Chewie growls. It’s not a threatening sound. It’s more frustrated than that. It’s the sound he used to make when Han Solo inevitably backed them into a corner. <<Even if I could give you what you want, how do I know that this same thing won’t happen to you? How do I know you’ll make it?>>

<<You don’t. But I’ll be out of your hair, won’t I?>> 

_And I’ll be with her. I’m sure of it._ This thought is enough to make him sit up a little straighter and consider getting out of bed. Because if the holocron sends his consciousness to the same place where hers has vanished to, it won’t matter if they never wake up. They can go on dreaming together, forever, as far as he’s concerned. He’s never assumed that he would join her in death. Certainly he would feel it, the way he felt his mother and Luke. And he would almost certainly die, too, especially if fainting in the shower is any indication of how the bond works. But that doesn’t mean they’ll join each other. In all likelihood what’s left of him will disintegrate into the Dark Side, and everything that makes her what she is will evanesce into some rarefied realm for beings whose brightest smiles burn like a saber between the ribs. So why not throw himself headlong into the same pit that has devoured her? Could that living death possibly be worse than this one? 

<<I remember that face, kid. And I don’t like it.>>

“Oh yeah? When was the last time you saw this face?” 

Chewbacca stands and stretches. It’s less of a stretch than an act of him pressing his paws to the ceiling and using the resistance of the ceiling to stretch the backs of his arms and his joints. He hears the old Wookie’s ligaments popping. They wince in unison. Then the Wookie turns away from him and makes for the door. He’s facing it when he says the words: <<The last time I saw that face was when your father turned back, to lay the charges at _Starkiller_. I knew what it meant then, and I know what it means now.>>

His eyes fall shut. “Then you know why I have to do it.”

<<Yeah, kid. I know. That’s what I’m afraid of.>>

* * *

Chewbacca does agree to let him see the book. With conditions.

First, he has to eat three whole meals a day. Second, he has to train with the old man every day. Mostly this involves Chewbacca picking him up and throwing him into walls. It feels good. Punishing his body has always felt good. But it feels better to let Chewie be the one to do it. He expects the two of them to just grapple and spar every day, and then Chewie starts him doing running drills up and down the hall, just endless awful reps, and he says <<If you’re that girl’s fuel cell, then you’d better charge yourself up.>>

Third, he can only spend an hour with the book at a time. He can look at the other books and maps and the diary as much as he likes, but the book that scared Rey, the one that describes the Holocron of Heresies in detail, the one bound in the skin of a Dathomirian child, he can only spend an hour with.

“I can handle it,” he’d said, before the Wookie unwrapped it from the rags Rey had hidden it in. 

<<We’ll see.>>

Then Chewbacca unwraps the book, and it’s like the room has filled with a thousand screams that harmonize and melt into a single note that’s almost too high for him to hear, and yet it drowns out everything else. His ears pop. Chewie is saying something. He doesn’t know what. He’s reminded, bizarrely, of the process of bleeding the crystal for his saber. And remembering it helps: he imagines the crystal burning inside him and him burning within it, and then he’s able to breathe.

How had Rey possibly managed to read this monstrous thing on her own? This horrid thing bound in black and yellow, deceptively small, sickeningly smooth, that somehow still smells like the embalming spices of Dathomir? He wants to throw up. He imagines her fingers drifting over it and he isn’t sure whether to kiss her or shake her for the bravery it must have taken.

The first time he touches the book, several things happen.

First he hears a high, thin scream. He can’t place the voice. It’s a woman’s voice. She’s on a table. She’s in terrible pain. Absolute agony. Not just physical, but spiritual. Her body is tearing itself inside out, but her heart has already broken. He reaches out for her and she turns to a fistful of sand, and he smells crisp flesh and when he looks up he sees two bodies burnt beyond recognition, bones gleaming black in the light of twin suns, and across the sky there’s a ship and he’s screaming _Come back!_ and his arm hurts and his heart hurts and his everything hurts and-

“Ben. Stop.”

His gaze snaps up. The room is frozen in place. Chewie reaching for the book, Dameron yelling somehing, Finn throwing himself in front of Rey’s medpod. The only person who can move is the one who isn’t quite there, the glowing blue figure in the white robes who looks no less smug now than he did that day on Crait.

“Luke.”

Delicately, he steps around the frozen figures. “Hi.”

His gaze flicks down to the book. It’s open. There’s blood on the pages. His. His nose is bleeding. He suspects his eyes are bleeding, too. “Are you here to dissuade me?”

“No.” Luke shakes his head. “We both know that won’t work.”

“I’m so glad we agree.”

“But I want to ask you the same question I asked Rey.”

It’s hard to restrain himself. “A little late for you to finish her training, wasn’t it?”

“It’s never too late. You know that.”

“I know she wouldn’t be lying there if you had done your job.” His snarl feels good. “You let her go. You let her fly right to me. You should have-”

Luke’s eyebrow arches. “I should have what, Ben? Kept her prisoner? Chained her up on that island, so you’d have to come rescue her, instead? Is that what you were hoping for?”

His mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The thought had never occurred to him consciously. But it had been there, at the edges of his instinct. Maybe hearing the story of his parents’ meeting -- the swashbuckling hero rescuing the princess -- so many times over the years impacted him more than he thought. Half the reason he wanted to find Skywalker was so that he could find Rey. So he could…what? Rescue her? From the man who once had tried to kill him? Wasn't that part of why he'd told her the story? So that she'd know just how dangerous the old man really was? It wasn't all about driving a wedge between them. That wedge was there to protect her. And if Rey had shown even a hint of fear, if he’d had even the smallest indication she needed his help, he’d have known exactly what to do. Because he _did_ know how dangerous the old man was. He _did_ know that she could never be truly safe with him. Why hadn't he just said that to begin with? The moment she learned the truth, she'd come straight to him. She'd believed him. Him, over Skywalker. And he had taken that faith and put it right in Snoke's hands. 

"What's done is done," he says. 

Luke shrugs, as though he’s officially done making his point. He looks around the little cell where they’re gathered. “What are you doing here?”

“They kidnapped me-”

“No. Why are you_ still_ here? You could use the Force. You could leave this place at any time. You could even take her with you.”

And this is true: for the span of a second they share the same vague impression of the room and its surrounding environment. There’s a skeleton crew at best. The Falcon is somewhere nearby. All he would have to do is incapacitate the people in this room, remove the restraining bolt on Rey’s pod, and they could leave. Go somewhere else. Anywhere else.

“I have no place else to go.” His voice is a whisper.

Luke is staring at the medpod. “She is very far away from us, Ben.”

“I know.” His fingers curl in the blanket. “I keep dreaming about her. In the dreams, she’s not herself, any more. And I’m…” He feels Luke focusing on him. “I’m not myself, either. I’m sick. I’m weak. I…” He swallows. “I’d give it all to her, if I could. I’d pour it out for her. All of it. Whatever’s left in me. Can I do that? Is there a way?”

Luke sighs deeply. “My father was led to the Dark Side by the promise of saving my mother from certain death. It didn’t work, then. It won’t work, now.”

“All you know how to do is fail,” he snaps. “It’s the one thing you’re good at.”

Luke doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead he nods. “That might be true. But I know that there’s nothing in that book that can help you. It didn’t help her, and it won’t help you. Do you know why?”

“No. But I know you’re going to tell me.”

“That’s right. I’m going to tell you what I told her. That book does describe the Holocron of Heresies. It does describe what’s locked inside, and how to activate it. But it doesn’t describe what the two of you are.”

He stares at her medpod, then back at Luke. “There isn’t a word for what we are.”

Luke shakes his head. “Didn’t Snoke tell you?” he asks. “You’re a dyad, in the Force.”

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a long time. I shouldn't have left you. 
> 
> I went away for a long time. But, well...the world is going to shit and we should all enjoy things while we can, right? Fanfic has really been there for me at some dark periods in my life, both as a reader and a writer. And I guess I want to contribute. I want to give people something they might enjoy. 
> 
> Besides, that holocron was just sitting there in SOLO waiting to be used in TROS...and it wasn't. And I hate unexploited storytelling potential. (Why focus on it if it wasn't going to be used?) This is a story about how the holocron from SOLO might have entered the cinematic storyline. It's basically INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, but about holocrons. And angst. So much angst. 
> 
> Moreover, one of TROS' many failings is not giving Ben the chance to face the consequences of his actions by having to look the people he hurt in the eye and take responsibility for what he did. The truth is that Ben hurt a lot of people, and I felt his redemptive arc was really weakened by not giving him the opportunity to atone properly. How great would it have been to have Rose tell him her sister died at the hands of the First Order? What would it have been like to have him meet the friends of those who died on those little transport ships he let burn? Redemption, like romance, isn't always grand gestures. It's little things. I wanted to write a story about those little things, too. 
> 
> So, I hope you enjoy this. And if you enjoy it, please let me know. This story lives or dies based on your comments, reviews, kudos, shares...your energy. And so does every other story out there, whether it's here or somewhere else, canon or not. That's how the Force works. Really. There's an all-powerful mystical force guiding and connecting us, and it's not the Internet, it's our love for this world and each other. So spread the love. That's how we win.


End file.
